


the dirt in which our roots may grow

by heartattacked



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Desert Keith Week 2018, Gen, Light Angst, Post-Kerberos Mission, Pre-Kerberos Mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-11 00:58:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15303924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartattacked/pseuds/heartattacked
Summary: a dissertation on sand and all its properties, written by a lonely desert boy.





	the dirt in which our roots may grow

**Author's Note:**

> i starting writing this for desert keith week until i realized i didn't know what day it would be for. then i forgot about it but lmao we're here now! /sips starbucks

Keith has never seen the ocean.

The closest thing he had to a body of water was the mostly dried up lake a few miles from his childhood home, and the only time he saw _that_ was when his dad wanted to let him loose somewhere without worrying about him.

In those few and far between days, Keith learned three things.

1) Desert soil particles are rough around the edges, proprietorially obtuse, comparable to dead weight, and lack hydration at the barest minimum to support any advanced life.

2) You can’t build a sandcastle with desert sand.

It’s coarse, porous, pebble-filled, and painfully hot. Much of the sand is broken up with minuscule rocks, shed long ago from mountains and riverbeds. Keith understood the science, even back then, but that didn't stop him from trying. He would sit under the heavy heat of the sun, scraping red soil from the sides of the lake with his bare hands and a rusted, dulled knife. He would press the dirt into the tin cans he brought from home, turn them over quickly and cross his fingers. He felt the absurd beating of his heart in anticipation, and with wide eyes, whipped the can away. For half a second, the cylinder held up, smooth except for indents in the shape of its mold, but then it would slide and crumble away into nothing more than a pile of iron-oxidized dirt.

3) Desert lakes don't sit on sand. They sit on a piece of earth crust that has happened to erode just a little bit.

He might have added a splash more of water but it would still fall apart after several goes, the unadulterated heat of summer pulling out all its support. He would rather have a tide to wash his castles away than to not even be able to finish. Deflated, he would return to his dad's side. The water wasn't even high enough to splash around in.

 

 

 

But that was eight year old Keith, and this is eighteen year old Keith—a Keith who is probably made entirely of heavy desert sand and the heat of impending summer, a Keith who is crumbling away as the core that held him up for years evaporates as if it had never been there in the first place.

The last few drops, he holds onto. He clutches them to his chest and cries out, maybe too violently, _"Stay! STAY! Don't fucking leave me._ " Because there's no choice. Without them, he won't be able to stay standing.

 

 

 

Trust becomes a bigger issue.

His dad dies; his memories of a home where love is the default phase in and out of existence. Sometimes, in the dark of night, he thinks he can feel careful arms around him, reminding him of something he'd lost long ago. By the time he leaves the orphanage, the arms are nothing but dreams and a source of anxiety. Not dreams— _nightmares_ : They snake around him, biting whispers into his ear, pulling at his skin, tracing horrible words where his heart lays, haunting him diligently.

They follow him like ghosts, pulling him back from ledges, embraces, and other scary places.

At least _they_ never leave him.

 

 

 

Human connection baffles him and at fourteen, he learns why. Shiro tells him to get on the bike. Keith frowns at him. Shiro, with a knowing grin, grabs him suddenly by the waist—a shock ripples all the way up to his wide-eyes—and lifts him up, and Keith has no choice but to let his leg swing over the seat and brace himself. Even after Shiro pulls away, moving to climb on, Keith's skin buzzes, the imprint of the hands (big enough to nearly circle his entire waist) lingering. He shivers, and not because he's cold. It's actually achingly hot as the sun sets.

The bike shakes as Shiro settles in front of him. Keith stares at his back, wide shoulders clad with a black jacket way cooler than his own uniform; he bites his lip hard and tries not to breathe too fast, worrying that Shiro could somehow feel it through the fabric.

"You're going to like this, I promise."

"Where are you taking us?"

"Just around the perimeter, I promise." And then, slower— "Hey, you might want to grab on. This thing has a jerky start."

Human connection baffles him; Keith doesn't touch people and people don't touch him. Touch a double-sided sword. It has to be reciprocated or it's meaningless.

Reciprocation is euphoria.

Dismissal turns into a nightmare.

But Shiro is inviting him in; asking him to _touch_. Maybe Shiro doesn't associate touch with fear. It probably doesn't dig up a lifetime old anxiety that the touch will _leave_ and leave him to wither away like water on an excruciatingly hot day.

But still, the handprints on him fizzle. They coax his arms forward, not circling Shiro's chest completely, but holding onto him halfway. He clenches his eyes shut as the engine hisses to life.

 

 

 

He is made of hands and sand. Every touch in his life accounted for by the sting of his skin when he remembers, and the arms of his mother enveloping him in a dark, dark cocoon. The space in between, all that is sand. Rusted and red, scorching hot, waiting for rain.

 

 

 

Even with his distrust of the desert, nothing can quench the thirst of being in it. Nowhere in the world do the nights get brighter, the earth fading to nothing but a silhouette to hold the sky. The sun and moon work in tandem to create a timeless, immovable earth so dry to the touch that it breaks and cracks and erodes into splinters and spiderwebs. In the cracks, life coils. Rattlesnakes and rattlesnake skin, some odd spiked rodents and demon toads. When the summer storms come, they dislodge the ethnology built between all these moving parts, and wreck abandon. Lightning tears through the sky like shredding paper, wild and sharp. The deep shrill of the sky echos through every crevice in the earth—uproots you. It's magic and terror. Lifts you up and sets you down again.

But there aren't any storms tonight, and the desert sings him to sleep as he finds his old house in the dead of night, sticky with sweat and hazy with hunger. He looks over the rubble of burnt wood and barely-standing walls and goes back to the bike. He hitches his legs one at a time up on the seat to unlace his shoes, turning them over, hanging them on the handles to keep sand out. Shedding the jacket and belt and gloves, he curls up in the sand against cool metal and falls asleep like that, head tipped to the sky and breathing clearly for the first time in months. (Read: since Shiro left, since Shiro died).

He wakes up with sand everywhere.

In his hair, his pores, pants and shirt sleeves. That's the nature of the desert. It invites itself in, and you have no choice but to let it.

The sky is bright and clear in the early morning, providing Keith with a rosy blue cocoon as the sun rises. Sunrise had always been his favorite time—the color, it's hard to beat. Pale and unbarring, spilling hopes and possibility over a sleeping earth and the only people who could fully let those things sink in are those awake to let them, awake to step into the light and savor what the universe has to offer.

He shakes himself off and brushes hair out of his eyes.

A feeling of emptiness coats his stomach quickly. The difference between hunger and hopelessness is slight. His stomach growls but the emptiness strolls in his bloodstream too. It makes him not want to move.

But he has to move, so he closes his eyes tightly, letting one small image in, and lets it fuel him. The sight before him, the broken and burnt shack, would have been enough to send him back to the Garrison on a good day. But this is his home now. Arms push him forward, arms pull him back. He is both the sand and the tin can. He crumbles; he rebuilds. He crumbles; rebuilds.

 

 

 

The abiding struggle of sandcastles is their impermanence, and their emptiness. You pack the sand, you trust the earth, older than you are, to hold itself up, and maintain the _something_ you built from _nothing_. But sandcastles are hallow. Beautiful and void. Just as sand will wash out to sea, so will a home with nothing in it. Castles are dead identities with dust for walls, houses have fallen with much steadier materials, and you can’t build a home with sand.

That's the truth of it: you can't build a home out of sand.

Keith takes a deep breath, picks up the boards, the bucket of nails, and sets to work.

**Author's Note:**

> hmm not 100% happy with this but i still think it warrants a publish :') thanks for reading!!
> 
> twitter: @heartcache


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